A lone figure is pacing the battlements of Craigmillar Castle. This is Queen Phaedre, a woman who is both fleeing love and burning with it. So infatuated is she with her stepson Hippolytus that she has to take a deep breath before she can even say his name. When she's near him, her sighs sound like last gasps.

The evocative setting of the castle ruins does much of the work in Offstage Theatre's site-specific production of Racine's tragedy about the brawl between passion and reason. The audience is led through a maze of towers, stairwells and courtyards by a giddy Greek peasant-girl, and the walls echo with voices as the spurned Phaedre wreaks a terrible revenge. Crows fly overhead when her husband Theseus learns of his son's grisly fate.

Love is as merciless as a bear trap in this play, which really needs a more probing and emotionally turbulent production than director Cressida Brown delivers. Henry Maynard and Alison O'Donnell are soulfully lovesick as Hippolytus and Aricia, but elsewhere the acting is on the drab side and Cleo Sylvestre is underpowered in the central role. Yet by the time the castle doors slam, we are left with the tragedy of a family - and a kingdom - laid to waste.